Mark Phillips, of CBS News' London bureau, is not normally part of The Cable Game. But the media are all Converged anyway, and besides his lively, even brave, coverage, on Friday night's Katie Couric broadcast, of the "Live Earth" show was a welcome tonic to all the p.c. piety that has surrounded the event, especially on NBC. And isn't it strange that NBC, which laid it on so thick--with guest-anchorLester Holt doing a lot of the ladling, on "Nightly News"--was also the network covering the event? Imagine that. No wonder Phillips of CBS got the leeway to make fun of the event.
The above picture, by the way, comes from MSNBC's website--it's right up there, "above the fold," as it were. Evidently NBC and its flunky-sidiaries figured--or were told to figure--that "Live Earth" was the biggest news of the weekend.
This piece of Mark's here--which notes that the performers used lots of energy, and that the attendees left lots of trash--only scratched the surface of the snarky tone of Mark's Friday piece, which mocked the whole idea of a global rock concert to fight global warming.
Unfortunately, Mark's Friday night video segment has been buried on the "CBS Evening News" website. Yup, for all the bragging that CBS has done, about joining the New Media revolution, TCG could not find a direct link to the Phillips piece. (Happily, I TiVo'ed it).
But in the meantime, TCG can only assume that the in-house liberals didn't want to give it too much exposure--because while it's great to dish the competition, it's even greater to boost the cause of liberalism.
Isn't that right, MSM? That's the logic that created Fox, of course, because the Old Media's unwillingness to cover legit stories--and to cover them fairly--opened the space for FNC. And yet even now, 11 years after Roger Ailes and Fox brought "fair and balanced" to the media table, there are still those who think that Liberalism Knows Best, and that enlightened liberals should administer the news to the proles and rubes out there.
